Princess Cruises confirmed the lower loss, again via Twitter, stating that The "Caribbean Princess lost propulsion approximately 25 nautical miles southeast of Dublin in the Irish Sea. The ship has electrical power and is operating full ship/hotel services, inc. air conditioning, galleys, lighting & toilets."

August 4 2016 Update: The Irish Times writes that It is understood the incident was initially treated as a potential security alert,due to fears of a terrorist incident at sea. However, Princess Cruises, the US company that runs the vessel, said it was 'never considered to be anything other than a technical glitch.'

Royal Caribbean's Splendour of the Seas caught on fire this morning as the cruise ship was sailing in the Mediterranean near the Greek islands.

“There’s thick acrid smoke all over the cabins," reported an Irish passenger according to UTV in London.

“We can constantly smell smoke. Smoke here. Smoke everywhere. Everywhere on the ship we can smell smoke," added the passenger.

A crew member contacted me after the engine room fire, saying that it was a "big fire" and the crew were summoned to their emergency stations for many hours. The ship is now heading toward Venice.

There were no deaths and the cruise line claims that there were no injuries. However, a passenger commented that "many elderly and disabled passengers appeared to be struggling."

He added “everything is smoke. damaged. The smell of burning plastic and burning rubber was very thick on our floor so everything in our room is contaminated.”

Royal Caribbean tweeted: "#SplendourOfTheSeas experienced a fire this morning in 1 of its engine rooms. Fire was contained & extinguished, all systems are functioning."

Royal Caribbean experienced a large fire in July when the Freedom of the Seas erupted in flames as it approached Falmouth, Jamaica. In May 2013, the Grandeur of the Seas sustained a large fire which the crew battled for over 2 hours as the ship headed to Jamaica.

Photo Credit: Ivan T. Creative Commons 3.0 Wikipedia

Update: The CruiseNeeds website reports that consumer expert Clark Howard, who is a passenger on the cruise ship, reported “We had a severe engine fire that lasted just under two hours . . . We were adrift at sea for a good while, and now we’re moving on less than half power.”

The Merco Press and Crew Center reports that Argentinian Police arrested two Royal Caribbean crew crew members on the Splendour of the Seas cruise ship for trying to smuggle cocaine to sell in Europe. The cruise ship was anchored in the port of Buenos Aires.

The crew members had taped the coke to their bodies. They had also hidden the drugs in a backpack.

The Splendour Of The Seas had arrived in Buenos Aires on last Monday from Punta del Este. it was scheduled to leave for Brazil and then sail to Europe. After the arrest of the two crew members, customs officials searched their cabins and other locations on the ship with 8 narcotics dogs and 20 inspectors and found additional cocaine for a total of 15.8 kilos.

The crew members, who were not identified, were a Croatian and a Chilean traveling on an Australian passport.

The drugs were worth approximately one million euros.

Drug smuggling on cruise ship is big business. So far this year alone, crew members have been busted for smuggling over 43 kilos of cocaine. In January, three cruise passengers were arrested on the Horizon with 20 kilos. Earlier this month, five crew members tried to smuggle 7 kilos drugs on the Norwegian Sun from Roatan to Tampa.

I have received inquiries from passengers about a man overboard from Royal Caribbean's Splendour of the Seas last month. The incident seems to involve a passenger who jumped into the water early one morning. He was promptly rescued. Most people are asking why hasn't there been any news account of the incident?

One passenger provided the following account, and asked "is RCCL keeping this under wraps? The Captain and crew should be congratulated."

"He was a 20ish American male passenger on ship with his parents and a brother. He apparently tried to start a fire in the early morning and security was called. He was extremely inebriated. When security arrived he ran and jumped overboard. This happened around 4:30 a.m. on the 13th of June. Around 4:45 or so Oscar, Oscar, Oscar was called out by security who saw him jump, and the Captain turned the ship immediately.

I was awoken at 5:00 a.m. from the loud sound of the stateroom as the ship was sharply turning. The walls of our room "groaned" loudly. As I got up and walked to my veranda, I realized we were listing badly toward the sea. As I got outside, I smelled smoke. Then we spotted someone (we were on the 8th deck) below us throwing out a flare. There were 3 flares in the water by now - thus the smell of smoke. We then heard "help" hollered out 6 times just off our side of the ship.

Then a life boat came about around the front and went directly to him. We were very close to this but could not actually see them lift him out. It was black out. However, they announced "we have him, he's alive, will be going to Medical." We heard a very few folks clapping from above us.

We heard he went to Medical and stayed there until we disembarked on Saturday the 14th in Venice. As we came into port, the pier was on our side of the ship. We saw Policia drive up and 3 uniform men got out and boarded our ship.

This was RCCL Splendour of the Seas "7-Night Greek Isles & Turkey" cruise from June 7-14, 2014."

Were you a passenger or crew member aboard the cruise ship when this incident occurred? Do you have any information, photograph or video to share? Please leave a comment below and let us hear from you,

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